by Hugo Navikov
“What about the Megapython? Why didn’t we see any of its eggs?”
“Their birthing season is done. Same with the cobras.”
“Yeah, I do seem to recall some ‘baby’ cobras,” I said, maybe with a bit of sarcasm.
“So what you are saying,” Bonte interjected cautiously, “is that we are standing exactly where these giant killer animals come up onto the island.”
Ellie and I jumped and ran out of the path like we had just realized we were standing on a trap door. Bonte followed us with a chuckle, but none too slowly himself.
“This explains why the soldiers can get at the Kasai Rex’s eggs so easily,” Ellie said, and ventured to place one foot just beyond the waterline and peer into some reeds and mud a few feet down the shore, where none of us could quite reach. “My god, there they are. They’re huge.”
She stepped aside to allow me a look and yes indeed, the soldier I saw was carrying something right about that size, and it seemed heavy as hell, too. “How do we know these aren’t giant crocodile eggs?” Ellie asked, giving me a chance to be the smart one.
“Crocs hide their eggs in the mud, pretty much covering them. I imagine Megacrocodiles would protect their eggs in the same manner,” I said, and waited for Ellie to be impressed.
It would have been a long wait.
Bonte also wanted to take a look at the eggs, and even he whistled at their size. “Cela ressemble à de la merde lourde,” he said, then translated to me: “That looks like some heavy shit.”
We had a laugh over that, but one question seemed to occur to us all at the same moment. Ellie put it into words: “So where’s Mama?”
We didn’t have much time to ponder this—although my answer would have been “lurking in the river, deciding whether to swallow us individually or as a group”—because there was a stirring in the jungle behind us of a kind that didn’t seem like snakes or panthers or anything else that represented the “normal” imminent death available in the Congo rainforest.
No, now we could hear low voices. These were humans. I glanced at the setting sun, and I knew which humans. It was the militia soldiers, come to make their final theft of the Kasai Rex’s egg and bring an end to the miners, however many dozens or hundreds had remained resolutely behind at the mine. They didn’t have us in their line of sight yet, so I silently indicated to Bonte and Ellie that we needed to get into the foliage for cover, and fast.
Fortunately for us, right off the path and far away from the eggs, we would be difficult to spot if they didn’t know someone was already there, and maybe if they did know. The soldiers—four of them this time, probably to grab more eggs to put an exclamation point on the theft for Mama—stopped and leaned against some mossy trees on the other side of the path, chatting and lighting cigarettes to smoke as they waited for the sun to go all the way down. The darkness made the Kasai Rex attacks that much more horrifying, and they were going for maximum horror here. I could see the miners, six people thick, screaming and pounding uselessly on the formerly welcoming door of Vermeulen Mining.
I wondered if Atari would use the security cameras to laugh at them. He was winning all the marbles, wasn’t he? And he had messed with my mind so much I didn’t know if I was fired or if my employer had killed my family or … anything at all, really. I didn’t even know for sure if I would even be able to get back home, even if I miraculously didn’t get weren’t snatched up in this cryptid’s crushing jaws.
Or was I actually texting with the Boss, and this was Atari’s overarching mind game? Did they kill my family? Did they poach animals themselves for millionaires? I could scarcely believe either of those … but the doubt was planted in my mind by that fat son of a bitch, and now I was in no place to find out what was what. I guess if the Boss refused to take my call, that would be an answer in itself …
I shook those thoughts away. First things first, and the first thing here was not dying.
So we hid. We had to see how the soldiers got the monster’s attention after they stole the eggs, to get her to come after them, raging and roaring.
It got darker, darker, and finally it was night. The men had flashlights—it was thanks to those that I saw anything at all when trapped in the jungle—and they flicked them on as they approached the nest. They must have felt pretty confident in their egg-snatching prowess, since they didn’t stop chattering the whole time. I was right—they had more men because they were taking more eggs for the big finale, trying to piss off the Kasai Rex to the absolute max.
I turned to Bonte and asked him very quietly what the men were saying.
“Ce sont des animaux,” he whispered back, sounding hollow. “Nothing more than animals.”
That sounded less than optimal. I imagine they were discussing the upcoming slaughter with light hearts and chuckles, and I hated them.
Now that it was dark, cigarette butts were discarded and the men formed a bucket brigade not ten feet in front of us, the two soldiers closest to the next up to their knees in the water and balancing very carefully to stay standing on the muddy bank and not fatally slide into the river, and the last one holding a flashlight to guide the rest. The first man bent at the knees, soaking the seat of his pants but getting maximum leverage to lift the first egg out of the nest, which I could see contained five more, tall ovoids each as tall as a dining room’s master chair and probably twice as heavy.
It seemed to me insanely reckless to be shining a flashlight around the nest, sure to bring Mama’s attention earlier than I would think they’d want. This was especially true because we could see quite well by the light of the moon here at the edge of the water. But before any stir came from the river, they had handed off three of the eggs, just as I thought they would with four men. What the soldier who picked the eggs from the nest did next made my mouth drop open with surprise … and then I realized it was genius.
The soldier grabbed one final egg—and chucked it as far as he could manage, swinging it granny-style from between his legs, into the river, where it sank like a stone.
Then all four of them, the first three hauling one enormous egg each, took off like their feet were on fire.
I saw a heaving in the water, and a hint of a tremendous tail in the moonlight. A tail? I wondered why the monster would be diving instead of crawling out of the water to chase the thieves, but of course: she heard and saw the egg go into the river and sink. She would dive to rescue that egg and place it back into the nest … and then she would see that three of the eggs were missing.
A sniff of the air would tell her what direction the thieves ran in, and the Kasai Rex would be after them—and would destroy every living thing in the tent city until she found all of her well-hidden eggs.
I figured we had about twenty seconds until Mama rose to put the egg back into the nest. We had to act now or we wouldn’t have a chance to act at all.
“What the hell do we do?” Ellie pleaded at a whisper, pulling on my shirtsleeve to emphasize her words. “If the cryptid follows the soldiers, everyone dies and Atari wins!”
“I know, I know …” We needed more time. But how could I buy us more time?
I jumped up from our hiding place in reflex, before my sudden plan had been able to travel from my brain to my feet. I waded into the water, bent awkwardly to reach one of the remaining eggs—Bonte was right behind me, so he was able to help before I snapped my back—and he and I lifted it out of the nest. And … oh my God.
The monster surfaced from the river, a giant fanlike structure poking through first and then the rest of her coming up behind it. In seconds, we could see the full length of the beast we were facing. And the sail, that huge sail on her, immediately identified our “cryptid” to me. This wasn’t a Kasai Rex, wasn’t a cryptid at all, in fact—
It was a dinosaur. A spinosaurus.
My son’s favorite, in fact, because it was the hugest and the most fierce, the alpha predator that could break a T. rex’s neck if it felt like it. My boy’s favorite movie was Ju
rassic Park III, and this big bitch was the star of that movie, which I had been forced to watch on video ten thousand times (and wished now I could watch with him even one more time, but no time for any of that now). In the movie, spinosaurus was a biped, but the creature before us was obviously a four-legged killer, looking like The Mother of all Crocodiles. She floated casually toward her nest, a place we needed to get out of before she saw that other eggs were missing.
“Spinosaurus,” I said in awe to Bonte and especially Ellie, who was crouched right at the shoreline listening to us. “The neural spines are the giveaway.”
“A dinosaur?” Ellie smiled widely. “A lesson from Harry Junior.”
I smiled, too, because it was. Then I shared another lesson: “Remember when General Cephu told us the monster—our spinosaur—could smell … um, fellow Africans?”
They nodded.
“The spinosaur, like T. rex, relies mostly on smell and on motion in its visual field. If we can overpower the soldiers’ particular scent, we can make her chase us instead.”
Bonte’s eyes popped out in alarm, but Ellie only nodded, getting me immediately. “If we can get her—her, funny, I didn’t think of the cryptid like that—to follow, at most three people die because she will have lost the scent to chase the soldiers back to the mine.”
“Exactly.”
Bonte waited just a beat before he spurted, “So what now?” in a tone of voice moving quickly toward panic, and I took the heavy egg from him.
“You run—run—back to the camp and get the miners out of there, just have them run through the city, to the airport, anywhere far enough from wherever those assholes are hiding those eggs. Go now!” As he ran off down the clearing after the soldiers, I picked up a dead sharp piece of branch from the jungle floor, pressed it against the shell, murmured, “God, please forgive me,” and punctured a fist-sized chunk out of it. “ELLIE, RUN!”
The spinosaur was just placing her rescued egg from her mouth into the nest. We ended up timing it just right—we ran as fast as the mud would allow just as Mama was distracted by her discovery that there were more eggs missing. She sniffed the air for information, then screamed her roar of unbridled fury, because what she could smell was the life fluid draining from the hole-punched egg I held as Ellie and I ran like demons.
We didn’t follow the clearer path, since that led back to the camp. Instead, we veered off into the tree-heavy area of the island. The spinosaurus was going to have to get past a lot of heavy woods to get at us. I hoped the trees would at least slow her down a little bit, because I snatched a quick glance or two at the impossible dinosaur now pulling herself out of the water to come after us. She was fifty feet long at least, and taller than the Vermeulen Mining building even before taking her giant sail into account. She stood on four thick legs and her snout was long, made for catching sea creatures but also well-suited for eating up more land-based, mammalian types like screaming humans. Which I believe we were about to be.
Ellie must have snuck a look as well, because she breathed out, “It’s magnificent.”
I thought I had heard the dinosaur ROAR and GROWL earlier, but that was nothing like the blast she gave now, shaking the trees themselves, as she smelled her baby’s essence flowing out of the egg, the life dripping away. I felt terrible about killing one of her eggs, but if it was the only hope I had that she’d follow us to wherever instead of following the soldiers to the tent city, then it was a load of bad karma I was willing to bear.
We ran then, staying near the shoreline so we wouldn’t get lost, but enough away from the water that the dinosaur would have to get through the trees. Ellie had to get her small but powerful flashlight out of her khakis so we could see what was directly in front of us, at least. There were roots and tangles of vines and huge nocturnal bugs which made my skin crawl, but nothing we couldn’t get past as yet. We needed the flashlight to see in front of us, but the spinosaur was huge enough to have her outline illuminated to visibility by the moon.
She definitely was coming after us and not following the soldiers on the usual trail, and when she hit the first clutch of trees, it sounded like a bomb going off. I chanced a look back again and saw that she had broken the trees she ran into, but they weren’t sheared down to the stump to allow her passage yet. She backed up a bit and hurled herself at the treeline again, this time busting through with her massive bulk and muscles and rage.
This was good news for us, because every foot we could put between her and ourselves was step closer to … I was going to say “survival,” but I didn’t even know if that was an option on the table. We just continued to run as the dinosaur crashed through the trees … and then stopped. It took us a few seconds to notice, then a few more seconds to stop and look behind us.
There was no sign of the spinosaurus in the woods now. Trying to catch her breath, Ellie gasped, “Where’d it go—”
Her question was overwhelmed by the blast of HRRRRRRRRANNNNNNNNNNNHHHHHH coming from the spinosaur, who had changed her direction of pursuit and was now almost perpendicular to us. She had given up on trying to mow down the trees between her and us, instead using her ease of motion in the water to propel herself up the muddy shore, catching up to where we were, but separated ninety feet or so from us because of the trees and jungle foliage near the water line. If there was any kind of clearing ahead that the spinosaur could slip through to us, we were dead.
At this point, we weren’t really running so much as semi-rapidly weaving our way through the jungle, faster than the spinosaur could have busted through the trees after us, but now she was throwing her bulk into the thick growth between us, knocking down some big trunks but then running parallel to us as we desperately scrambled over obstacles big and small.
She kept pace but couldn’t get to us as of yet. However, she would find a way where there was less between her and us, and it was obvious she was smart—and enraged—enough to bide her time.
Ten more minutes went by with us climbing over and under the riotous foliage when Ellie said with weakened breath, “Brett, where are we going? We can’t keep this up much longer.”
She was saying exactly what I was thinking. It was an island in the Kasai, that much we had determined along with its width at the point of the path, but its length was something we had no idea about. Were we nearing the north of the island, where we could cut and head back toward the mines? My idea was that we would lead Mama to the mines on the side opposite the river, so that she could find the eggs the soldiers had placed there to ensure maximum destruction and leave off the chase in time for us to somehow get into that bunker building and wait out the fury of the dinosaur.
I didn’t have anywhere near the breath to tell her all of this, but she trusted me and I would repay that trust by not doing anything insane. We’d continue north for a few more miles and then …
Oh, bloody hell. There were lights ahead, bright lights, the kind of lights that are meant to illuminate a wide area like a sports field. And since I doubted anyone had set up a baseball diamond here on a distant point on the island, it could only be one thing up ahead:
Soldiers. The militia that planned to seize the mines along with our old friend Atari.
I could guess from my commando days that they had cleared a part of the forest where they could set up a small base from which to make secret raids and cause mayhem among the miners and maybe even the rest of the population of Tshikapa. They weren’t visible here, and five would get you ten that their clearing included a nice smooth area for boats to be pushed from and also to be dragged onto so they weren’t seen or damaged.
That meant this part of the rainforest was about to thin out and then disappear entirely for a stretch, exactly what our prehistoric predator needed to get at the thieves who had the smell of her baby’s fluids all over them. We couldn’t just turn left and run into the jungle, because we would become hopelessly lost without any chance the sheer luck of finding the path the dinosaur had cleared out over God knew how many
trips back and forth. We had to keep moving forward, north with the spinosaurus now just fifty feet or so away, scrambling up the waterline to keep pace with us.
What do you do when you can’t go forward and you can’t go back? You stop.
I shut off the flashlight—there was plenty of illumination from the militia base two hundred feet ahead of us—and held out an arm across Ellie to slow her down, the egg being empty enough for me to carry with the other arm. We stopped running and she didn’t need me to put a finger to my lips to remind her to stay quiet. We stopped and took in lungfuls of air, even though the stitches running through us didn’t allow for much at first.
Mama must have thought we were still running, because she continued her thumping and sliding up the shore until she got to the base. The unholy ROAR sounded again, and immediately I heard men shouting amidst gunfire, AK-47s emptying their magazines into the tremendous spinosaurus. I couldn’t see if the weapons had any effect on the beast, but I could hear that they hadn’t stopped her entirely. She let loose another ground-shaking shriek of utter violence and fury, and then I heard men not shouting anymore but screaming.
Our girl must not have been hungry, because as we crept closer we could see that she wasn’t bothering to swallow the soldiers, instead just impaling them on her teeth, crushing them into pulp with a couple of bites, and then tossing their pieces and parts wherever as she went at another victim.
“Can we get away now?” Ellie asked. “I think I don’t like actually finding a cryptid.”
I breathed a laugh at that, and the same question had occurred to me. Should we ditch the almost-empty shell of the egg and try to get back to the mines? Was there any danger that the dinosaur would continue to follow us, meaning that going back to the camp would put the miners in the danger we had just tried to save them from? And if we didn’t go back, would Atari and his men just do this again tomorrow night? We couldn’t play cat-and-mouse with the spinosaur forever, and bullets didn’t even seem to bother her, let alone kill her.
